Procedure and House Affairs Committee on April 25th, 2023

[Rachel Blaney, NDP, North Island—Powell River, BC]

Okay.

My next question is this: Who has the power to remove a candidate, and has the method of reviewing when to remove a candidate been changed or matured through this process of learning and understanding the impacts of foreign interference on elections?

[Azam Ishmael]

For the Liberal Party of Canada, the way the process works is that, up until the point at which a candidate is endorsed to Elections Canada—because once you're endorsed to Elections Canada, it's only you, the candidate, who can remove yourself from the ballot, as per the rules set out in the Canada Elections Act—the green light committee has the ability to revoke somebody's approval, but it would be the campaign chair who would have the authority to remove a candidate. However, that only goes up to the point at which Elections Canada has been informed because once Elections Canada is informed, the candidates need to remove themselves.

[Jeremy Broadhurst]

I would also, maybe, take from your question.... I mean, one of the things about this process has been the intelligence agencies' learning about the whole political process.

I can tell you anecdotally, from working with them through government, that they didn't have great understanding of the political processes and the timelines involved, so when they would provide information, they were not thinking about timelines. They were not thinking about anything like that. They were just providing information to parties. However, their sophistication, in terms of politics, is evolving as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

With that, we're going to do a quick question from the Conservatives and then a quick question from the Liberals before we do a quick suspension for the next panel.

Mr. Nater.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, for the indulgence.

The Prime Minister has stated repeatedly that he has never received any information about candidates' receiving money from China. I'm asking whether you can confirm that the Prime Minister, in fact, does not have knowledge of any candidate, nomination, contestant, electoral district association or political party having received funding, either directly or indirectly, from Beijing.

Second, following the September 28 and September 29 briefings—with CSIS on the 28th and the Prime Minister on the 29th—can you confirm whether any further information regarding those matters was shared with any external entities, including authorities or law enforcement entities, after those two briefings?

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[Jeremy Broadhurst]

I'll start with the first question. The Prime Minister was truthful in his statement. I have nothing to add to it.

With regard to the second matter, I just want to make sure that I'm understanding it. Are you asking whether we went to authorities different from the ones who spoke to us in the first place?

We did not, as any authority that I could have thought of at that point already has a working relationship with CSIS. There's an MOU in place, for example, with the commissioner of elections, who investigates electoral malfeasance. There's a free flow or exchange of information there. It's not our place to do that since it's not our information. It's CSIS's information. Anything that I could have thought of at that time, or that any of us would have thought of, would have already been covered by the existing relations of the intelligence agency.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Mr. Fergus.

[Greg Fergus, Liberal, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

I'll be very brief.

As we discussed earlier, nothing ever came to the panel that would meet the threshold to alert Canadians and parties of foreign interference. Why then do you think the Conservatives lost those seats in the GTA and in the Lower Mainland?

[Azam Ishmael]

Jeremy could probably speak better to 2019.

When you think about 2021 and that election campaign, as all of you as elected members would know, each community votes on issues of concern to their own community. That said, I would say that primarily in the GTA and Vancouver areas, banning assault weapons and having responsible gun laws in the country were of primary concern to these communities. As such, in these campaigns our message spoke to them and we were successful in those elections.

[Jeremy Broadhurst]

I would echo that.

I think sometimes it's easy for observers of politics to fall into the fallacy of thinking, particularly with regard to ethnic communities, of there being some sort of monolithic block that have their own set of issues that are foreign to others. That of course is not the case. Canadians have this funny way of making up their own minds about what issues are important to them in any given election campaign.

What we saw repeatedly in 2019 is that a message around community safety, particularly responsible gun control, was resonating there.

There was a feeling in some of those ridings that had previously voted Conservative that the Conservative Party had lost the plot on that. We were able to identify that and get good candidates to win the election.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

That's excellent.

I would like, on behalf of PROC committee members, to thank you both for coming to join us.

There is some information that members have requested. If you could send that to the clerk, she will have that circulated around. If you think of something else that you wish you had said or wanted to share, please do not hesitate to send that to the clerk. Once again, the clerk will circulate that around.

With that, I am going to....

Mr. Cooper, is it about this? I need to keep us tight because we have other guests.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair.

I wanted to pick up from where you left off that there were three undertakings for—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

I think I made the point.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

I just wanted to be clear as to what they were.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

I'm very clear that they know.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Well, just for the record, it is that the undertakings pertain to the general election campaign manager for the candidate for Don Valley North, the nomination campaign manager of the candidate for Don Valley North, as well as the field organizers and their respective roles in the GTA.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

The time that was taken for that is noted.

On that, I would like to thank you both for joining us.

We will suspend the committee for three minutes so that we can have Mr. Marshall sound-checked in.

Mr. DeLorey, we welcome you in person.

We will have a quick turnaround so we can get the next panel started.

Thank you. Keep well and safe.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Welcome back.

For the next panel, we have with us Mr. Fred DeLorey, former national campaign manager for the Conservative Party. Joining us by video conference we have Mr. Hamish Marshall, partner, research One Persuasion Inc.

Welcome to you both, and thank you for being here with us today. You will have up to five minutes for your opening statements, and then we'll proceed to questions from the committee members.

Mr. DeLorey, the floor is yours. Welcome.

[Fred DeLorey, Former National Campaign Manager, Conservative Party of Canada, As an Individual]

Madam Chair, good afternoon, and thank you for having me here.

My name is Fred DeLorey. I served as the national campaign manager for the Conservatives in the last general election.

In regard to the matter at hand, I'm going to tell you what I heard and what I know, but given the limited amount of time for my opening statement, my expert opinions will come through my answers to any of your questions later. With that, I'll jump right in.

When it comes to foreign interference during the campaign, we did hear the odd rumbling that something was going on, but it was anecdotal at best. During campaigns, the rumours of misconduct are common and usually end up going nowhere. However, after the campaign was concluded, we noticed some results that felt off. That's when internal rumblings of foreign interference became much louder. Hearing these, I had instructed our field operations teams to investigate the matter by communicating with various local campaigns and reporting back to me.

The report I received came back in memo form. I will read this memo into the record now, and I'd be happy to provide the committee with the electronic version of the memo later, as well as the attachments referenced in the memo.

This is from the memo:

"There's a strong case to be made that there was a degree of influence exerted by an outside actor in the Chinese community during the 44th general election. From speaking with campaign teams and regional organizers, we believe this influence negatively impacted our standing in these seats: Metro Vancouver: Richmond Centre, Steveston—Richmond East, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, Fleetwood—Port Kells; in the Greater Toronto area: Markham—Stouffville, Markham—Unionville, Richmond Hill, Willowdale, Don Valley North, Scarborough—Agincourt, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, Newmarket—Aurora, and to a certain extent Mississauga Centre.

"Through message groups on WeChat, text-based and news-content-style articles were circulated which directly targeted the Conservatives or expressed support for the Liberals. From what we've been hearing, these articles have been popping up on all sorts of groups, especially non-political ones. However, when one of our supporters posted some of the pro-Conservative articles, they were told that their content was too political and was removed from the groups.

"In one example there's an article that starts with 'Crisis for Chinese Canadians, we need to save ourselves', 'Stop the Conservative extremists from getting in power'. Another is, 'The Liberals want your money; the Conservatives want your life', a third is 'The Canadian version of Trump, leader of the Conservative Party wants to block WeChat and vowed to fight China to the end.' Attached you'll find additional examples of other articles that were posted and shared."

As you know, WeChat is the main messaging social media platform used by the Chinese-speaking community in Canada and is directly controlled by Chinese corporations. There were also anti-Conservative ads without authorization tags that were displayed on digital screens in a Chinese grocery store in Scarborough—Agincourt.

The concluding part of this internal memo directed to me reads:

"It's our understanding that the federal Liberals were not expected to do as well as they did with the Chinese community and that they did not coordinate this campaign directly."

Again, I am prepared to forward this memo and the attachments referenced to the committee.

After I received the memo, I forwarded it to our representatives who were sitting on the task force, as we had been instructed to take everything through that.

I was briefed later by our representatives that when they brought the evidence to the task force, they were informed that there were legislative gaps and there was nothing that could be done.

That concludes my opening statement, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Mr. Marshall.

[Hamish Marshall, Partner, Research, One Persuasion Inc., As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My name is Hamish Marshall. I was the Conservative Party of Canada's national campaign manager in the 2019 federal election.

Obviously, the 2019 election was conducted in the shadow, or the lead-up to it was in the shadow, of allegations of foreign interference in a variety of western democracies. It was something that our party took seriously and pushed the government to take action on. It's something that I took seriously as campaign manager and with our campaign team.

Early in my time as the national campaign manager, I met with a senior academic from one of Canada's leading universities, who made clear what the operating assumption for myself and everyone in our senior campaign team should be: We should assume that all of our electronic communications were compromised by Chinese intelligence and possibly other countries as well. That's something we took seriously. We took the approach that this was something that was being monitored by foreign powers, at the very least.

The government created the protocol and a committee of senior civil servants with the mission to go public if certain thresholds of interference were broken, not if there was any interference; we've seen that there was. There were reports after the 2019 election that there were small instances of interference, but none of them at the threshold.

I was one of the Conservative Party of Canada's representatives who was security-cleared and got the secret clearance on SITE, the security and intelligence threats to elections task force. I went to briefings before and during the election. There were probably half a dozen briefings overall. I was instructed at those briefings not to speak about the specifics of what was discussed and what was shared with us as part of our secret clearance. I will not be able to give specifics from that.

I will say, though, that including political parties was a good idea. When the process first started, it was very clear that the intelligence services, and frankly many of the civil servants there, took a very sort of standoff and confused view of political parties. I think Mr. Broadhurst said earlier that he felt there wasn't a lot of understanding of what we do and our processes, and I would echo that. There was a feeling that political parties were these odd institutions that were sort of on the side of government. There was almost a level of discomfort in dealing with political parties.

I believe political parties are institutions that are fundamental to the nature of democracy in Canada, so incorporating them in the SITE process was good. My regret is that it ended at that point. I think we should be looking at a scenario where political parties are briefed on and included in these matters around election interference between elections, and not just in the immediate lead-up and during elections. I think that would build more trust and be a better way of interfacing between the intelligence services and political parties, which, frankly, will often be the first organizations to see evidence of foreign interference. The ability to have those dialogues I think is extremely valuable.

I will also say, I think to echo something Mr. DeLorey just said, that there seemed to be an extreme, I would say, or a great deal of reticence—I can only speak to 2019—around declaring anything above the threshold for public disclosure. It seemed to me that the people involved, the civil servants involved, were more concerned about being accused of interfering in the election themselves by making something public than the possibility of foreign interference. It's my belief that almost anything that came there would not have met the threshold, whatever the threshold was, for disclosure, because they were so concerned about being seen to interfere.

Perhaps that's rightfully so, but that is something that needs to be fixed going forward. We've now had the 2019 election. There was a report afterwards saying that there was interference, but it wasn't enough to mention during the campaign. Where that line is drawn I think can only help to undermine confidence in Canadian elections. We all have to be very, very, very careful about that.

I'm happy to discuss any of this further.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

We will now enter into six-minute rounds. We still start with Mr. Cooper, followed by Mr. Turnbull, Madam Normandin and Madam Blaney.

Go ahead, Mr. Cooper.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

Great. Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

I'm going to direct my questions to Mr. DeLorey.

Mr. DeLorey, you stated that during the campaign, the Conservative campaign had heard rumblings of interference by the Beijing regime, but there was nothing there that could fully substantiate it, if I understood you correctly. During the campaign, was the SITE task force in contact with the Conservative campaign to alert the campaign of any interference activities that they may have observed?

[Fred DeLorey]

I was not a part of the task force, just to be clear. We had representatives that we appointed to it.

What I was informed of was that it felt like a one-way street, where we would bring information to them—concerns that we had seen—but didn't necessarily get anything back in terms of foreign interference.

[Michael Cooper, Conservative, St. Albert—Edmonton, AB]

When you speak of this one-way street, the campaign was bringing pieces of information through the party's representatives on the task force. Some of that was anecdotal information and other pieces of evidence.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, so you can agree or disagree. It sounds to me like it was going into a black hole.